Abstract: Ruth Roemer (b.1916) is an activist and advocate on such issues as women's reproductive rights, tobacco laws, health manpower,
AIDS, and national health insurance. Before Roe
vs. Wade, she helped establish and served as vice-chair of the California Committee on Therapeutic Abortion to help legalize
abortion. She influenced California to become the second state to pass a law allowing abortion on certain categorical grounds.
The collection consists of correspondence, papers and printed materials of the California Committee on Therapeutic Abortion,
including files, articles, pamphlets, legal briefs, speeches, photographs, press releases, clippings, and other materials,
including those from vice-chair Ruth Roemer.

Repository:
University of California, Los Angeles. Library Special Collections.

Open for research. STORED OFF-SITE AT SRLF. Advance notice is required for access to the collection. Please contact UCLA Library
Special Collections for paging information.

Restrictions on Use and Reproduction

Property rights to the physical object belong to the UCLA Library Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright,
are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright
and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

Ruth Roemer earned a JD from Cornell Law School in 1939; as a research associate at Cornell in the late 1950s, she worked
on a study of mental hospital admission laws in New York; her group's research was published under the title,
Mental illness and due process, and the New York state legislature enacted many of its recommendations into law; Roemer became an activist and advocate
on such issues as women's reproductive rights, tobacco laws, health manpower, AIDS, and national health insurance; before
Roe
vs. Wade, she helped establish and served as vice-chair of the California Committee on Therapeutic Abortion to help legalize
abortion; influenced California to become the second state to pass a law allowing abortion on certain categorical grounds;
wrote second edition of a monograph for the World Health Organization, reviewing worldwide legislation to control the tobacco
epidemic; she also fought for the implementation of a national health insurance program for the U.S.

Scope and Content

Collection consists of correspondence, papers and printed materials of the California Committee on Therapeutic Abortion, including
files, articles, pamphlets, legal briefs, speeches, photographs, press releases, clippings, and other materials, including
those from vice-chair Ruth Roemer.

Organization and Arrangement

Arranged in the following series:

Correspondence files (Boxes 1-2).

Printed materials, mostly articles (Boxes 2-3).

Ruth Roemer files (Boxes 4-11).

Indexing Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.

Subjects

Roemer, Ruth, 1916- --Archives.

California Committee on Therapeutic Abortion--Archives.

Abortion--Government policy--Citizen participation.

Pro-choice movement--California--Archival resources.

Related Material

Frances Noel Papers
(Collection 814) . Available at the UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.